Book Review: The Rose and The Crown, a Nice Read

I’m still elbow deep in my hunt for an editor/content manager job, and have been transitioning my kids to summer, which always includes a neighborhood getting-out-of-school party:

What my neighborhood does to celebrate the end of the school year.

A post shared by Jamie Moesser (@jmoesser) on May 31, 2018 at 5:25pm PDT

…as well as more substantial chore charts (with the accompanying wailing and gnashing of teeth), and shopping for shorts, summer clothes, and braintime activities. We like to do lots of hands-on things—read-a-thons, science experiments, art projects, museum visits, etc.—and have accumulated a lot of materials and resources over the years for that, but I like to take them shopping for new kits, books, etc., whatever gets them excited about continuing to learn over the summer. Of course, I pay them for their chores, with Braintime being one of them, so there’s that. As the summer progresses, I’ll share ideas and stories of our learning escapades, and I hope you’ll share yours with me too, in the comments section below!

In the meantime, I read The Hero and The Crown by Robin McKinley. It’s a speculative fiction book about a young princess who doesn’t look the way people of royal birth in her kingdom look, and doesn’t feel like a princess because she’s been told since she was born that her mother, upon giving birth to her and seeing she was a girl, turned her face to the wall and died of despair. Aerin is shy and retiring, but when a power-hungry village in the north of her father’s kingdom starts causing problems that he has to go and tend to, she’s left to deal with the threat of a dreaded dragon. She struggles, not only with the burden of figuring out how to do that and strengthening her fortitude so she can, but also against the perceptions that everyone has about her and she has about herself, that it will be impossible for her to defeat the dragon.

What I Thought of It

Although the plot knits together fairly well, it takes a while to get going, and the climax is over in two seconds, which makes it feel somewhat anti-climatic. She’s led to a dark wizard who wants to take over her father’s kingdom, but she strikes him down (rather easily actually), which indirectly helps her save the whole kingdom. It was a nice read.

Who Might Like The Hero and the Crown

If you liked The Waking Land by Callie Bates, Dark Breaks the Dawn by Sara B. Larson, or Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold, you’ll like this book.

If you’ve got a Kindle, it’s available on Amazon for $5.38, which is 23% off the paperback price.